What should Apple call next year’s iPhone? iPhone 8, or something else? [Poll]

Concept image: @MesutGDesigns

With next year’s iPhone expected to be a major redesign, you can put good money on it that it won’t be called the iPhone 7s. We’ve been tending to use iPhone 8 as a shorthand reference to the 2017 iPhone, and a sketchy report today suggested that some of Apple’s employees may be using the name in the same way, but that’s by no means the only possibility.

Given that the rumored all-glass casing and full-screen face with embedded Home button would represent a pretty dramatic new look, it’s possible that Apple may want to celebrate that difference with a completely new naming strategy … 

Apple may feel that simply skipping the 7s name and jumping straight to iPhone 8 represents enough of a signal that this is a leap to a new-generation iPhone, so that’s the obvious first option in our poll.

With 2017 representing the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, some have suggested that the name might mark that in some way. ’10th Anniversary iPhone’ would seem a bit too cumbersome, but for a company whose premium range of laptops is officially known as ‘MacBook Pro with Retina display,’ I wouldn’t rule it out entirely …

A simpler name that would also reference the 10th anniversary would, of course, be iPhone 10. A related possibility is that this is instead rendered as iPhone X in a similar way to Mac OS 9 being succeeded by Mac OS X in 2001. That could get messy in subsequent years, however: XI, XII, XIII, XIV and so on.

Another alternative that has been suggested is a year reference, suggesting that next year’s phone could be the 2017 iPhone. One issue with this, however, is that a September release date would mean the 2017 iPhone would still be on sale well into 2018, perhaps making people feel they are buying an outdated model. Apple could opt for the car industry’s approach to this, naming each year’s models after the following year, thus the 2018 iPhone.

Finally, some have suggested that Apple could simply abandon both prefixes and suffixes and simply call it ‘iPhone.’ This would, though, raise the question of what subsequent models would be called.

So, let’s find out your preferred name in our poll, and if you have any additional ideas, please let us know in the comments.

Concept image: @MesutGDesigns